1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to advertising materials delivered in hypermedia documents. More particularly, the invention concerns a method and apparatus for delivering video ads with enhanced user interactivity features.
2. Description of the Related Art
The field of advertising is changing drastically as a result of advancements in technology, such as the popularity of mobile devices, and the decline of print media. Electronic ads now appear in websites, video clips, emails, and many other locations, media, and formats.
One perpetual challenge is how to better engage the viewer in an advertising campaign. Electronic ads such as web page banner ads and videos compete for the viewer's attention, but it can be difficult to attract the viewer's attention to a particular ad. It is even more difficult to develop sufficient interest that the viewer “clicks” on a banner ad, or permits an automatically activated video to run without the viewer closing it.
A separate challenge that confronts advertisers is, once a given strategy is implemented to engage viewers, how to determine the success of an advertising campaign. Some delivery mechanisms for video advertising collect statistics and report them back to advertisers. In some cases, these statistics include the number of different viewers that started to view a particular video ad, and how long the ad ran in viewers' browsers before being closed. However, these statistics are not a comprehensive as some might like, to more accurately assess the success of an advertising campaign.
Hence, it can be particularly difficult to gauge the success of techniques implemented to better engage viewers if the mechanisms for measuring success of an advertising campaign are limited.